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Underscoring the virtue of focusing on US innovation, science, technology and entrepreneurship: in a stunning series of recent events, I have had a front-row seat to, US venture-backed company , Kurion, based in Irvine, CA with a team led by CEO and 30 year nuclear industry veteran John Raymont was revealed this week to have been selected by Japan to rapidly bring its technologies of isotope separation and modular vitrification to help treat, extract, contain and environmentally isolate radioactive materials. The only US company, it joins Toshiba, Hitachi and France's Areva in working together in a global effort to rapidly solve problems with impressive coordination and assemblage of nuclear know-how.

The Kurion team which has remained in stealth since its inception some years ago, quickly mobilized at the request of senior industry officials in the US and Japan. It is widely expected that the size and scope of the Japanese situation at Fukushima will be larger than the US own defense clean-up efforts from pre and post cold-war bomb-making sites such as Hanford--and may take as long as 30 years.

Currently nearly 25%, 1 in every 4 dollars spent by the US Department of Energy is spent on nuclear-waste cleanup, an understandably widely underreported fact, and arguably the most pressing environmental problem in the United States.

As reported earlier this week by GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher:

"...TEPCO tells Reuters that the amount of water that it has pumped into its reactors to stop them from overheating has reached about 87,500 tons. That water, which is contaminated with radioactive materials, needs to be cleaned, and the group’s technology can “adsorb and isolate radioactive elements, then the treated water would be re-used to cool down the reactors,” reports Reuters.

Kurion’s technology and business plan is to make the process of vitrification — or turning nuclear waste into glass — modular, which makes it cheaper, faster and more efficient. Vitrification essentially permanently encapsulates nuclear waste, and while it’s still radioactive, the waste can be stored and transported more easily. Kurion has also developed a better vitrification pre-treatment process.

Josh Wolfe, a partner with Lux Capital that invested in Kurion along with Firelake Capital,explained to me in an interview late last year that Kurion’s process called the “Modular Vitrification System (MVS),” “brings the technology to the waste tanks, instead of taking the waste to a massive centralized treatment plant.” “Our technology flips the vitrification process on its head,” said Wolfe, “making vitrification an order of magnitude less expensive.”